After ten weeks of development Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.9. The latest version of the kernel now has a device mapper target which allows a user to setup an SSD as a cache for hard disks to boost disk performance under load. There's also kernel support for multiple processes waiting for requests on the same port, a feature which will allow it to distribute server work better across multiple CPU cores. KVM virtualisation is now available on ARM processors and RAID 5 and 6 support has been added to Btrfs's existing RAID 0 and 1 handling. Linux 3.9 also has a number of new and improved drivers which means the kernel now supports the graphics cores in AMD's next generation of APUs and also works with the high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips which will likely appear in Intel's next mobile platform. Read more about new features in What's new in Linux 3.9.

There are various message passing APIs, MPI being a well established one, but to my knowledge none have been incorporated as a standard IPC & system call mechanism at the operating system level such that applications can make direct use of OS services without building more middle tier abstraction layers on top of other IPC/syscall mechanisms.

There are a lot of cool things we can do, but an operating system that is rebuilt from the ground up to do them would face a market share problem regardless of it's merit.